Corporate online learning platforms are typically designed for companies that train their employees or for companies that offer outsourced instructors. Mindflash and Editors’ Choice tool Docebo are better for companies that conduct training sessions. Conversely, a system such as Firmwater is designed to help trainers and training companies quickly create, automate, and sell training sessions to a broad audience. LearnUpon (which begins at $599 per month for 50 active users and one client portal) fits either use case. It’s a versatile tool that can be used by companies of all sizes.
How Pricing Works
As just stated, LearnUpon starts at $599 per month for 50 active users and one client portal; this is pricing for its Basic plan. Pricing for its Essential plan increases to $999 per month for 250 active users and two client portals, and to $1,699 per month for 500 active users and three client portals for its Premium plan. If you need more, then LearnUpon offers a customized package, but you’ll have to negotiate specific pricing with the company directly.
What you’ll immediately love about LearnUpon is that you can load as many learners into your system as you like. You’ll only be charged based on the learners who log into the system. So, you can dump your entire workforce into the system but, if only 100 users log in and take a course, then you can stay at the lowest price tier. That’s a pretty sweet deal compared to other systems on the market. For example, WizIQ starts at $40 per month for 50 active users and jumps up to $127 per month for 500 active users. WizIQ doesn’t specify between users and active users, so you’ll have to be careful about how many people you load into the system. Pricing for Docebo is $3.33 per user per month for up to 300 active users. All of these systems will expand beyond the stated maximum capacity for a custom price, and some, like Docebo, lower the per-user rate as you load more users into the system.
Other systems, such as Firmwater, charge based on the number of courses as opposed to how many people will be using the software. Firmwater starts at $495 per month for 100 classes, two portals, and an unlimited number of users. Firmwater adds charges based on additional course starts, not additional users.
White-Glove Treatment
LearnUpon’s training software integrates with the company’s proprietary e-commerce suite as well as PayPal and Stripe, among other tools. Like Firmwater, LearnUpon also integrates with Shopify. This setup gives training companies and mom-and-pop course creators the ability to hawk their wares to as large an audience as possible, as opposed to working with a select group of businesses. LearnUpon offers a two-way application programming interface (API) that enables companies to plug into existing storefronts should you already have one built. What’s especially convenient about LearnUpon’s e-commerce offering is that it lets you set bulk purchases so that companies can purchase one course for 50 people at once. You can also enroll groups in one batch via Microsoft Excel, and then enlist them all into one or more classes without manually entering their data.
LearnUpon plugs into Google Analytics (GA) so you can see who is visiting your storefront and what they’re browsing. You can also tie LearnUpon into Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, and most social networks. However, it doesn’t offer the expansive third-party reach of a tool like Docebo, which has dozens of integrations.
LearnUpon administrators receive a full, complimentary training session when they begin using the software. Additionally, every admin is assigned a customer success manager who provides proactive support and an account manager who is responsible for onboarding.
Because LearnUpon works for both internal and third-party training, users can create different portals to let members of staff or clients access the software. Like other training systems, you can adjust background colors and banners, add welcome messages, and add terms and conditions as well as customizations. Admins can customize the learner dashboard with an endless list of Welcome content, including a Calendar view, new courses, blog posts, and video.
The Learner Interface
The Learner dashboard can display up to three multimedia banner images, including embedded videos and GIFs, which give admins a way to update users before they go into courses. For example, rather than just typing in plain text, “Don’t forget to take your ethics seminar,” admins can post GIFs and videos from TV shows like NBC’s “The Office” to add some humor to the typically tedious business training industry. Beneath the content, learners see the courses in which they’re enrolled (all of which populates automatically). Learners can see how many modules are required for each class as well as how far they have progressed. Click Resume from the main dashboard and the course automatically starts again. Within the Learner environment, you can even embed corporate Twitter feeds to keep learners abreast of the company’s social media activity.
The gamification portal gives you access to activities, badges, leaderboards, and levels. Admins can toggle gamification on and off. They can create custom badges or use pre-built ones as well as associated points with them. The points automatically accumulate for every course taken and they update on leaderboards. All learners can see their leaderboards on the main Learner page. However, learners can also click into a gamification-specific page to see all of their badges, company leaders, and leaders by class. You can even let learners share their stats on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Administration and Course Creation
For admins, the primary navigation is tucked neatly into a drop-down menu in the upper left-hand side. This space-saving feature is one that we wish more enterprise tools would employ. Once you click on the Dashboard, you’ll see 11 new tabs: Catalog, Certificates, Courses, Enrollments, Groups, Library, Portals, Reports, Settings, Store, and Users. Within the Settings tab, you’ll brand your learning environment and your additional portals. No development work is necessary for rebranding; use the templates and color picker to determine how your portal will look.
Because LearnUpon captures so much information, there is a ton of tabbing and data entry required when creating courses. For example, the Information tab requires course description details, pricing, categories in which you’d like the class to appear, due dates, and email notification reminders. It’s a minor quibble but one that will nag at people who don’t have massive course libraries or learner databases.
You can insert any kind of content imaginable into your courses, including video, Microsoft PowerPoint, PDF, and Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). You can follow up with exams and surveys, including essay-based quizzing or video-based quizzing (in which students film themselves). Changes to courses in the library are reflected in every learning path loaded into the system so, if you change one while you’re working on your California plan, then it will also change when it’s automatically assigned to users in the New York plan. If you make changes to a course a learner is already in, then you can choose whether or not the learner sees the changes when they move forward.
LearnUpon offers robust oversight to ensure students view course videos. Video tracking enables admins to require customers watch a certain percentage of video before skipping. You can set videos to pause if someone tabs out; you can also set it so that learners can’t fast forward. Or you can have no oversight whatsoever and turn everything off. You can schedule live sessions in advance via Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, and Webex. LearnUpon records attendance of these sessions.
But one nagging issue is that you can’t interrupt pre-built Microsoft PowerPoint decks with exam questions. Therefore, you’ll either have to ask all of them at the end of the lesson or create multiple modules to break it up with quizzes.
When you create a test, you can populate it by pulling from question pools. You can’t just pop a random question into an exam without tabbing out to create a new question pool, though, which is annoying. Unfortunately, there are only six different types of answers: true or false, pick one, multiple correct, order list, match list, and fill-in-the-blank. There are several options for delivering questions and feedback, though. You can include direct or indirect feedback, time exams, and choose when to show the correct answer (when they get it right, after the second failed attempt, etc.)
The tool’s Smart Search feature lets you search for anything in the system: type in a query and the results will include courses, users, and groups. From within the Search bar, you can take action on the search results, such as making an edit to a course, creating a new enrollment, and editing a user profile—all without having to tab back to the main dashboard.
User settings can collect custom data such as employee numbers and location, which can be pre-populated from a human resources (HR) management system, which is a nice touch. You can then edit that data within the learning platform to suit your specific course requirement needs. For example, you can make personal information mandatory for students to gain access to courses or you can set employee ID numbers as passwords for more anonymous, group-based learning and reporting.
As with any online learning system, you can create groups to organize your learners. However, with LearnUpon, you can use groups to auto-assign courses. For example, if you tag someone as being from a region, then that data auto-assigns users to a region-based group. Let’s say everyone in the California office needs to pass a course on recycling; adding someone to the California group will enroll them, which is especially helpful for new hires.
LearnUpon offers custom email templates that make sending notifications to learners easy. You can edit the sequence and the frequency of when emails are sent (almost as you would with a standard email marketing tool). Emails also come in templates. You can free type to enter text, or drag fields into the body of an email, such as first name and last name, that will dynamically populate within the emails.
LearnUpon also offers a robust e-commerce package. You can allow bulk purchases and multiple purchases on behalf of others (which is suitable for HR people buying for company learners). LearnUpon offers a store that you can build and customize. The store lets visitors search by course or by keyword. They then can view images and descriptions of courses or read customer reviews before buying. You can even embed your Twitter feed directly into the store so users see your most recent tweets. LearnUpon also offers basic search engine optimization (SEO) snippets and Google Analytics (GA) best practices to help you improve store performance. You can create coupons and offer discounts, too. Seriously, it’s a full-fledged course catalog commerce platform.
The Bottom Line
LearnUpon’s gorgeous user interface (UI) is intuitive and quick to navigate. Course creation is straightforward and easily discoverable for learners. With gamification and an assortment of live learning partners, LearnUpon has propelled itself into the upper echelon of the online learning category.
However, the tool’s reliance on module-based course creation makes adding questions and quizzes to courses a bit more tedious than it needs to be. LearnUpon is still a notch below the elite learning tools but the line between them has become very thin.